Cultural Differences
I talk to people all over the world in my job, and over the past six months I have noticed a few fundamental differences in how they approach their job.
Europeans are my baseline. They are generally very knowledgeable about what they do – not all of them, but most of them. They are no-nonsense and interested in solving problems without assigning blame because they do understand Murphy’s Law very well. French customers will always ask for French support even when their English is quite good.
I seem to get a lot of Americans whose knowledge of the subject matter is very basic. Not all, mind you – but a lot seem to require much less advanced help than Europeans. Management escalations also seem to be more common and more serious for them.
Japanese customers are very precise in their questions and will want to know the answers in unending detail. They’ll often follow up with questions for clarification or further details. It seems like they want to know every quirk and every contingency. I think this is their way of covering themselves in case their co-workers, bosses, or customers ask them and they do not want to have to reply “I do not know”.
Indians are the most “difficult” of the bunch. They seem to lack creativity and they will often ask a question multiple times, even after it has been answered. For example, I had one customer who asked me every few minutes “Can just reboot the device on our end?” – to which I repeatedly told him, “No, do not do this, you will lock yourself out of it.” They also expect you to babysit them the most, and they will very often ask you to “give them an official answer in writing for my management”. The reason for this is very simple; it seems that in India, an employee can – and often will – get fired for the smallest mistake. I actually can understand it – if there is almost no job security, you will not want to risk yours by taking any chances. Still, it makes working with them a little difficult at times. At least the Indian guys are unfailingly polite and exceedingly patient.
Schroedinger’s Girlfriend
Here’s what my relationship with Lin is like at the moment: She tells me that she likes me and wants to be with me, but still insists that she’s in Tokyo. In reality, she is in Berlin. I pretend I don’t know about this, and try to encourage her to make up her mind and stop the pretense. I feel very annoyed and depressed by all of this. It isn’t so much the suspense of not knowing what’s happened inside the box; it’s just that at my age I feel tired of this type of game. I am almost at the point where a dead cat wouldn’t bother me so much – sure, it would be sad, but at least it’s a kind of closure.
Am I taking the analogy too far?
But why do girls have to make everything so difficult? Why couldn’t she just say, “hey, I will study German in Germany, when it’s all done I’ll visit you because I really like you”? Or just do her German class and stop pretending to like me. And it’s not like I had a weak moment and professed my undying love for her, and she’s just trying not to hurt me – she started it.
I am much simpler. If I like a girl, I’ll either tell her or shut the hell up. If a girl tells me to get lost, I get lost and never bother her again. If a woman likes me as well and we start a relationship – no matter how tentative – I do my best to make it work. And I never, ever tell lies to a girlfriend. Nothing on the scale of pretending to be on the other side of the world for months when I am basically next door.
I’d just tell Lin to go to hell – except that, unfortunately, I like her. So I let her walk all over me. What a pathetic geek I am.
Literal Interpretation
“I cannot configure my cluster,” the customer told me on the phone. “I need your help.”
“What is the problem, sir?”
“Every time I connect to my server, it just disconnects me.”
“How do you connect? Telnet, ssh, web gui?”
“SSH. The web page does work.”
I pondered this for a moment. I had the customer check that ssh access was actually enabled. It was. So I asked the customer to tell me exactly what steps he was taking, and how exactly he was getting disconnected. Did the connection get refused, or closed?
“Closed – it just says ‘disconnected’ in Putty’s text window.”
Wait a minute. Putty doesn’t do that.
“Sir, it doesn’t mean your ssh disconnected – it just means your cluster nodes are disconnected. If you try to enter some text, it should work.”
“You know something,” the customer replied after I heard some keyboard clicks, “it does.”
Well, another job well done. I then walked the customer through a configuration I had never seen before – I am still learning about these products – and it actually worked afterwards. At least I now know why I am sitting on this end of the telephone line.
Six Months Without World of Warcraft
Until the end of last year, I was an infrequent player of World of Warcraft and Eve Online. This is actually an interesting thing because I don’t really like either games. I find both to be very repetitive. At elast Eve-Online is well-balanced and pretty well designed; something that can’t be said about World of Warcraft. On the other hand, World of Warcraft at least has some role-playing going on.
After I moved to Munich at the beginning of the year, I canceled my accounts. This was mostly done because I was on a short budget (moving costs a hell of a lot of money). With one WoW and two Eve accounts, that’s about 45 Euro a month or – now get this – 540 Euro a year. No wonder everybody and their pet dog are jumping on the MMORPG-bandwagon!
I had originally considered to subscribe again once my bank account had filled up a little, but to be honest – I couldn’t care less. Yes, there are some people I left behind – especially in World of Warcraft – that I would never talk to outside the game. But you know what? If a friendship can not exist outside an artificial world, then what kind of a friendship is it anyway? And, yes, I did try to keep in touch. My MSN messages remain unanswered half of the time.
“Sorry, I was busy raiding.”
Well, good for you.
Spam and Parties
This morning I got spam for:
- Wine
- Cigarettes
- Penis enlargements
- Breast enlargements
- Viagra
Sounds like spammers know how to party.
Sweet Sleep
After suffering from insomnia for several days – which I am wont to do at times – I managed to get an incredible nine hours of sleep in last night. Since I normally sleep no more than six hours a night this tells you just how dead I was feeling. On the downside I didn’t get any writing in all night, but there’s always the weekend ahead.
Insomnia
The night before last night I slept really badly. I was feeling sick in the evening and felt sick in the morning. However, when I was about ready to go to work my stomach had calmed down sufficiently that I decided this shouldn’t be my first sick day of my career and went to work.
During the day, two colleagues told me I looked awful. “Hey Support Drone, you look even worse than I do,” said one. “And that’s an accomplishment.” The other remarked on my unhealthy yellowish simpsonesque appearance. D’oh.
So I went home at 5pm for a change. Early bedtime for me sounded like a good idea.
Only I couldn’t sleep until about 11pm. Wasn’t even remotely sleepy, so I played around with Inkscape (I am trying to learn). When I finally did fall asleep, I had a nightmare about space aliens impregnating Earth women and trying to colonize the planet that way. Woke up at 3am, couldn’t sleep again until 5:30. At least I got an extra hour of sleep before I had to get going.
Wonder what my co-worker will say today. So far I feel relatively relaxed. But tonight I better catch a full eight hours of sleep, or I will be downright grouchy tomorrow.
Relationships
I may be a terrible geek, and rather plain-looking too, but I can proudly say I have had plenty of relationships over the years. However, it seems that most of these relationships are really, really weird.
My current “girl of interest” is a Chinese girl who lives in Japan. Let’s call her Lin. She isn’t officially my girlfriend – the distances involved are way too large for this. However, we spent some great vacations together in the past, in Japan, China, Thailand, France, Germany, and a few other countries; and we talk to each other almost every day.
Of course we’ve discussed the problem of distance in the past, without any real conclusion. It’s just very hard for me to learn Japanese, or Chinese for that matter; and even if I did it would literally be years before I could speak the language well enough to live there.
Things have moved ahead a little recently; two months ago she told me that she signed up for German classes, which would begin in May. She claimed there was no deeper reason for it. “After I was in Germany, I simply became interested in the language.”
Right.
That’s not the weird part yet. Near the end of April, she suddenly disappeared for a few days. I was already starting to get worried, but she showed up online again and everything seemed back to normal. Except she replied to my text message with an email, didn’t want to be called on Skype, and significantly changed her behavior online as well.
I finally figured out what is going on, partially at least. Her email shows that she’s currently located – get this – somewhere near Berlin. She’s completely avoided mention of this, pretending to still be in Japan; and she hasn’t showed up here in Munich either.
I am fairly certain she didn’t find herself some other guy in Germany; and when I asked her why she’s acting so oddly she said she would explain it soon, but it “wasn’t anything bad”.
I am not sure whether I should be happy – because she’s learning German – or angry – because she’s not telling me what’s going on. I guess I just have to wait and see what happens.
What’s the deal with Beer?
So I finally made myself drink the alchol-free beer I accidentally bought. I must admit: I threw most of it away. It just didn’t taste nice. I guess it sort of tasted like a watered-down lemonade, except someone used burnt wheat instead of lemons. How anybody can get addicted to this stuff is quite beyond me.
